Disrupted Dialogue

This book tells the critical story of how and why a breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred two centuries ago and how it was repaired in the past three decades when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue. Veatch sees the origin of this renewal in the shift from acute to chronic disease as the dominant pattern of illness, the rights revolution of the 1960s, and the increasing dominance between physician ethics and ethics outside medicine.